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Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Monterey Pop (June 17th and 18th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[MONTERY POP screens Saturday June 17th at 7:05 pm and Sunday June 18th at 4:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Music (and film)
producer Lou Adler, who helped stage the Monterey
International Pop Festival, proudly boasted that a "phenomenal"
1,100 media people covered the event (press arrangement handled by the ex-publicist for the Beatles), thus guaranteeing
that the weekend of June 16-18, 1967 would go

down in history
as the apex of the "Summer of Love." From that mix of cultural
revolution, undeniable talent, and stage-managed corporate hype came
MONTEREY POP, first in a cycle of widely-released,

mass-audience
"rockumentaries."

The feature
directed by D.A. Pennebaker skims highlights of the three-day, 33-act festival.
First the hippie music fans arrive, one predicting that the concert in
Monterey, California, will be "a love-in...like Easter, Christmas
and your birthday all at once!" Even the many police patrolling
the Monterey County Fairgrounds are shown smiling benignly.

When the songs
begin, one witnesses live performances that encapsulate the era: "I've Got
a Feeling" by the Mamas and the Papas; "Rollin' and Tumblin'" by
Canned Heat; "59th Street Bridge Song" by Simon and Garfunkel;
"Bajabula Bonke" by Hugh Masakela; "High Flying Blind" and
"Today" by Jefferson Airplane; "Ball and Chain" by Big Brother
and the Holding Company;
"Paint it Black" by Eric Burdon and the Animals; "My
Generation" by the Who; "Section 43" by Country Joe and the Fish;
"Shake" and "I've Been Loving You Too Long" by Otis Redding. The Jimi
Hendrix intro to "Wild Thing" is the stuff ofrock
legend--Hendrix jamming on his electric guitar with no hands by twirling it
through the air and letting the wind vibrate the strings.

From time to time
the camera cuts to the festival-goers, a happy aggregate of
Haight-Ashbury habituees, caught on celluloid before Hollywood
mutated the counterculture into camp hippie stereotypes (or
Charles Manson mutants). There's a pet monkey with "love" painted on
its forehead, a concession stand giving away "free rocks," and a pretty
girl from Champagne, Illinois, who finds herself unexpectedly on
the all-volunteer cleanup detail.

During the finale,
as Ravi Shankar plays an Indian raga, a montage unites all ages
and races among the transfixed onlookers.

It's a very
selective presentation, conspicuously lacking footage of the infamous
moment when Laura Nyro was jeered off the stage for singing
doo-wop. Neither are there overt signs of the rampant

drug use or
political infighting behind the scenes (San Francisco "activists"
threatened a simultaneous counter-festival to protest Monterey, a foretaste of today's bursts of "liberal" intolerance),.
Compared to D.A. Pennebaker's previous feature DONT LOOK BACK, the
warts-and-all portrait of Bob Dylan, MONTEREY POP seems very much
an authorized presentation of its subject. It was indeed a
commercial hit, allowing moviegoers a vicarious taste of the
once-in-a-lifetime concert gathering and paving the way for the rather more
involving and complicated WOODSTOCK and GIMME SHELTER. (3 out of 4 stars)